The ultimate goal of all network infrastructures is to deliver applications effectively to users.

Continuous performance improvements in PCs and LAN infrastructure have made it easy for IT to enable effective application delivery within a building or campus. But maintaining an acceptable level of application performance across the WAN proves a consistent challenge. IT needs to address the WAN attributes that have slowed application performance for decades:

• Bandwidth limitations

The most obvious restriction for application delivery over the WAN is the reduced bandwidth available on WAN links. To keep up with these increases, enterprises have had to constantly increase the size of their WAN links. But given the high cost of these recurring expenses, enterprises are understandably reluctant to increase them. A compelling alternative is compression technology, which replaces repeated data sequences with short flags for transmission across the WAN link.

• Latency

The impact of latency has historically been a little less obvious and less well understood than the bandwidth limitation on WANs. Reducing latency itself is not possible,  the option for IT to consider, then, is how to reduce the impact that latency has on how the enterprise applications behave. Techniques that change the window size of older clients, eliminate a RTT from the TCP session startup, or replace TCP with another reliable but more efficient transport can significantly increase application performance.

• Application contention

Once applications hit the restricted bandwidth available on the WAN, they must contend with each other for access to that precious bandwidth. Increasing bandwidth through compression techniques reduces contention, but it not possible for IT to fully eliminate the possibility of contention.

What IT needs to resolve application contention is a simple wizard-based GUIs that walk them through the steps needed to set up QoS, using common-sense, application-based information to apply business policies and set prioritization requirements.

• Transport inflexibility

Because of the unpredictable nature of Internet performance, most of companies today install public links as a backup connection to their existing private links.

Path Optimization devices can be used to allow enterprises to spread their application traffic load across both links, increasing application performance while they maintain their service-level commitments.

BTC provides customers with WAN Optimization solutions using Peribit products and solutions which includes techniques for compression, sequence caching, latency reduction, bandwidth management, path optimization, and visibility.